Castles of Ash
by elteya
Summary: With Waterdeep under siege and Halaster disappeared, it doesn't seem like things could get any worse. What our hero hasn't yet accepted is that things can always get worse, and they always will. Stare too long into the dark, and the dark begins to look back. - HotU. f!PC/Valen.
1. i: the yawning portal

**disclaimer:** all characters/places belong to their respective owners. Palieth is mine.

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**_i: The Yawning Portal._**

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The city is full of ghosts.

Everywhere I look there are shadows of people— gaunt faces stare out from behind boarded windows. The shops are dark and lightless. There are no children on the streets. Ghosts. I am familiar with ghosts, but cities like Waterdeep are not their usual haunts. Grim shapes take form and definition in the gloom should you look long enough. All the traces and turns and odd bumps begin to look like bodies: the twist of an elbow here, the unnatural break of a knee there. Under one of the lanternposts I see the rotting carcass of what could have been a goblin in this life, green and shining with decay, the crows picking at the last of its eyes.

Waterdeep is besieged.

The Yawning Portal is not much different from the streets, and though there are fires burning in every hearth in the long hall and the smell of food coming from the kitchens, there is no cheer here.

Men and women and children of every shape and size and race huddle on the floor next to each other, sitting on any available surface, wrapped in makeshift blankets, eating from small bowls. A small human girl watches me from the arms of her mother as I shut the door behind me. There is water in my ears, on my hair, dripping down to my shoulders through the folds of my cloak. It's cold. It's stirring. The city is sleeping under a haze of dread, and the rain is the only clean thing here. I wonder why I always answer summons. Many a thing would be so much easier if I did not not have a care.

"Nobility is good, little one, but the good and the foolish have often been one and the same," Father would say.

The journey has been a blur— one inn to the other, hands, faces, names I cannot remember. A girl helps me with my things. Pretty, fair-haired, bright-eyed. Young. So young. She introduces herself as the innkeeper's daughter, but I barely hear her. There is something sleeping below this inn, and the dread crawls the walls like lice. She says she'll show me to my room, and I wonder why I will have a bed tonight when all the refugees of the Yawning Portal will be making the floor their mattress.

My room smells like cedar and fir, and I will never get used to the ache of knowing that the skin and bone of sleeping dryads is used to build these places from the bottom upward. But it is no different from the way the Uthgardt people that raise their tents from hide and tusks, no different from taking a life on a hunt and thanking the gods for their providence while your kill turns golden and fit to eat over the fire. Death is just one more compromise. It is as natural as breathing.

"I hope you enjoy your stay," the girl says nervously as I lower my pack to the floor. "As much as you can, anyhow."

What must I look like to her, drenched, tired, worn by one too many an adventure? It is odd to see admiration in anyone's eyes, especially those of the young. One day she will realize that life is not a song. The bards are too merciful in their epics.

She seems mortified when I look at her next. "Forgive me, My Lady, I should not have spoken out of turn."

"You have not spoken out of turn, or wrongly," I tell her, already prepared to resign for the night. Formalities have never been my strength. "Thank you for the room. I am certain to rest well here."

"O-oh, well," she stutters, and fiddles with the hem of her tunic, "thank you, My Lady! I will bother you no longer. Goodnight."

I press a gold coin into her palm before she goes and shut the door in her horrified face. The room settles into quietude and the hammering of my heart slows, the blows softening inside my breast.

Peace at last.


	2. ii: the attempt

_**ii: The Attempt. **_

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I awaken quickly, like I used to all those years ago, mad with panic, cloaked in a chill sweat drying on hot skin. Nemilsanë— where is she?— I slide my hands beneath the pillow and clasp them around the hilt. The feeling of the worn leather against my fingers is like the sweet forest songs, the relief of swimming in icy water, and there is only an instant to savor it in.

_Dust. The cave smelled of dust and age. _

The dream lingers, as dreams are wont to do, but I slip from the over-stuffed mattress to the floor, and the bite of the cold nips at my skin. Awake. I have to be awake. There is someone by the chest— my things, my equipment, _my most prized possessions. No! _No one must have them. They are mine, mine alone, the only material objects I allow myself to have on the lonely nights and the long journeys, and more than anything they are my stories. My memories. They cannot be taken from me.

Light fills the room in a brilliant bloom of blue, blotting the figure crouched by the chest out of sight, and against the black of my closed eyes I can see patterns of strange blossoms and twisted shapes from the mangled dream.

When the magic fades and everything grows dark once more I see the outline of her in the dying embers of the fire the innkeeper's daughter had stoked for me. The chest is gone. Reamed in orange and taller than me half-a-head, the thief is like a figure from the dream I woke from, with cruel lines to her face and ill-will burning strong in her scarlet eyes. So much hatred in one so outwardly beautiful. She is here to kill me, or to help in it.

"You rivven will all die!" she hisses and lunges forward, daggers flashing from the sheathes at her hips, and we fall to the ground in a tumble of limbs and leathers, her in crimson assassin's finery and I in my nightclothes, and I feel the bite of her steel at the soft skin of my ribs. Too easy. She thinks wrongly, and moves too clumsily.

She curses me in the tongue of the drow and I knock one blade from her hand. A spark of magic opens my palm and Nemilsanë is lost to me, clattering to the ground to be kicked under the bed, and she begins to drive the remaining dagger home. I am pinned beneath her weight.

_Dry— we are so deep, far beneath the skin of the earth, and there is no water here. Not one drop. Oppressive. Stifling. Dead._

I can still taste the metallic tang of the dream-cave in my mouth as I twist her wrist up and to the side, straining further and further until I hear the crack Father told me to listen for when he first taught me to defend myself without iron to help me. The thief screams, agony shearing the highest notes of her voice into a helpless whimper, and she is exhaling when I slide the point of her own blade beneath the cage of her ribs, stopping only when I feel the fiber of her heart tearing on its wicked edge. The steel nicks a rib and she shudders against me, talking in blood and gasps.

Dress a thief all you desire in a killer's garb: they will never be one.

The drow girl dies in my arms with the ties in her thick white hair loosening and spilling into my hands. I close the accusing, staring eyes, and think that perhaps, somewhere, there is one in this life that had known her as beautiful and was no stranger to her smile. I wonder if they expected she would breathe her last here, in a mockery of an embrace, her blood spreading on a well-polished wooden floor, making like garish black-red flowers in the flickering firelight.

Perhaps not.

Two heartbeats have passed since the thief met her end when the door is flung open and the golden light of the inn spills into the room, bathing it all— the grim scene in every detail— in an unbecoming radiance.

The innkeeper's daughter stands in the doorway, silhouetted in yellow, flaxen hair shining.

"Gods!"

Gods, yes. Gods indeed.


	3. iii: the common room

**a/n:** anyone alive out there? XD

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iii: The Common Room

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Storybook heroes are milling in the common room of The Yawning Portal, and I feel worlds away from every one of them.

Tamsil, I had learned, is the name of the innkeeper's daughter— and it suits her and her kind face and the welcoming way with which she had escorted me to the armory before taking her leave so she could inform her father of the thief. I am wearing ordinary chainmail from the armor stand upstairs, and though it is nothing extraordinary it is not badly crafted. It is different from what I am used to, my forest leathers, and the linked bodice of gleaming mail pressing into me is a sensation I will have to reacquaint myself with.

I had grown complacent. Too confident in my abilities— too slow. And I have now paid for it, though not as dearly as I could have.

The comforting weight of Nemilsanë against my hip is an anchor. All my things were taken, even the precious hickory-wood longbow that Father had given to me on a bitter winter night when I was too young to understand the importance of his gift. It is unbecoming of a ranger, a servant of nature, supposedly free from the trappings of troublesome emotion, to be so preoccupied by the loss of material items, but dwelling upon it will bring nothing of them back.

Durnan is a man worn deeply not so much by his age but by his trade, and I can see the lines in Tamsil's countenance that one day will harden as his have. As they stand by each other, talking quietly, I can tell they are father and daughter, and watching their similarities laid bare like this, down to the last detail— it wakes an old, too-sweet ache inside my heart, and I am eager to see it gone. The adventurers around me all seem to belong here more than I do. There is a monk in the far corner of the room bending thin ingots of iron into circles. It is my hope that such a skill will aid him when it is time to enter the Undermountain.

Many of the more eager ones in here will not survive. The unlucky young, mostly, come for glory or luck or whatever it is fledgling adventurers with their whole life before them seek. A bard with a strident voice shoves past me in a hurry, the purple feathers in his hat bent, and it is the commotion that finally brings Durnan's eyes to mine. His teeth— surprisingly clean for a man of his age and occupation— flash white behind his salt-and-pepper beard as he greets me.

"Palieth Centholen," he says, as though this is the first time we meet. The warm breadth of his palm comes down once, twice, on the leather pauldron of the spare armor, and I allow him a small smile. "You are a right sight for sore eyes. Times are… difficult."

"Well-met, Durnan," I return, though it is not entirely meant. "It is a grievous matter for which we have gathered." My eyes travel around the room. I have looked and looked but each time I turn there is a new adventurer or squire or mercenary in ramshackle hide armor. "Though I see there is no shortage of volunteers."

Durnan shakes his head, fingers stroking through his beard in a gesture he has repeated many-a-time in moments of anxiety. "They are foolish. The Undermountain is no place for children or boys with blunt swords and lyres. It is all merriment and songs now, but they'll be climbing over the bodies of their brothers soon enough." He shuts his eyes. Tamsil frets silently beside him. "The well will see more of them down than it will up. It is an ugly business, Centholen, one I wish we had no need for."

"On that we are agreed," I return, feeling foreign with a strange bow on my back and daggers that are not mine in my boots.

"Day by day the attacks increase— the drow are getting bold," Durnan says, the grey of his eyes turning silver when he glances at the fire crackling jollily in the heartb at the north of the room. "Bold enough to even come here, aboveground. Tamsil told me what happened. It is a fortunate thing you were awake."

I remember the drow from My Dream, the one in the blood-red mail and the terrible, beautiful face; the one who had summoned the assassins. The terror of her had awoken me more surely than anything else, but it is a secret that is mine to keep.

"Fortunate, yes," I echo, asking myself if it truly was. Silence stretches long between us. "And what of Halaster?"

Durnan snorts. "What of him? He is an old mage, mad with magic and refined in the art of dread trickery. The Undermountain is his domain— has been, for many years now, but there is no telling what insane whim made him unleash the forces of the Underdark upon us. Perhaps this is simply another game to him. Perhaps he has finally died. Fell wizardry has made him outlive many of the elders of Waterdeep. Halaster was ancient when I was bouncing on my nan's knee." He pauses, looking at his daughter, as though he is seeing her for the first time. "Whatever part of him that was human wasted away long ago."

"He must be an entertaining host," I remark, and Durnan laughs: a short, rough bark of voice that startles many in the room, though he pays no heed to them.

"Prides himself on it, I believe, though I'd kiss an orc as soon as I'd sit down to sup with him," the innkeeper replies, and gives his beard another thoughtful tug. "It is good— that you are here."

My answer never reaches him, for a tide of air so cold and biting sweeps through the room; the heavy oaken door to inn's cellar flings open as though it is made of nothing more than paper, splintering when it meets the wall. The torches on the wall die, hissing and smoking, and not long after the flames in the fireplace gutter and disappear, and the common room is filled with the smell of coal and ash. The panicked murmur of confusion rises above us, and I see Tamsil talking to her father, though I cannot hear it, and I know she is as good as blind in the darkness with her human eyes.

Durnan is turning to face her when a plume of magic soars to the ceiling of the room, hitting the rafters and dissolving into burning sparks that fall on us like stinging rain.

"Drow!" someone in the room screams, and cries go up in the gloom like wildfire.

Another shock of magic rends the air, and all is chaos.


End file.
